Guest blog entry #2 from Delle: A very mild obsession...

Okay so now we're going a long way back to the day after the London adventures – the story of my first weekend in England.

After a long, deep, blissful sleep, I awoke on Saturday morning (5th July) incredibly excited about the day’s events. We were going to visit Pride and Prejudice (often abbreviated to P&P) filming locations – more specifically, two Pemberleys (home of the gorgeous Mr Darcy – eeeek!) – ‘eeek’ ‘eeek’ excited screaming, jumping etc...

But before I run away with my feelings on that subject...

Before we began our day indulging our P&P obsession (well my obsession; Anna & Dotti’s high levels of excited interest; and the boys’ less significant levels of interest), we had to wait for Dotti’s English friend Joe to arrive. Joe arrived, we met him and then we were off!!!! YAY YAY YAY 'more excited squeaking and jumping’. (NB. Accuracy note. Jumping in car is quite restricted by roof so really more like very enthusiastic bobbing.)

Our first destination was Lyme Park – filming location of the exterior scenes in the 1995 BBC version of P&P starring Colin Firth. Any residual tiredness was completely compensated for by the extremely high levels of adrenalin coursing through my veins (dramatic I know but I was rather excited!).

We visited the gardens first. Much jumping and squeaking excitedly followed – by this time all the guys had started to pay out on my expressions of excitement but I was WAY too ecstatic to even be bothered in the slightest…

I eagerly pointed out the patch of grass where Darcy and Elizabeth first met at Pemberley, the stairs that Darcy runs down in his haste to stop Lizzie leaving, the view of the house that Lizzie first sees of Pemberly, and of course the driveway where Lizzie looks longingly back at Darcy at the end of Episode 4... not to mention the famous spot at the lake’s edge where Darcy jumps in and gets his shirt delightfully wet.

Yes I am tragically obsessed, I know. :P As you can possibly imagine, my levels of excitement and rapture were increasing rapidly with the discovery of each new delight. I did manage to stay still long enough for a couple of photos. :D



















Well I could rhapsodise all day, but to cut an obsessive girl’s story short… we also explored the inside of the house and had a quick picnic before heading to the second Pemberley location – Chatsworth (from the 2005 movie version starring the equally adorable Matthew McFadyen). More rapture, jumping, squeaking etc etc etc followed.

In a summary of two sentences, this place had amazing water features, a cute little maze and an awesome rockery. The house was incredible, with detailed painting all over the ceiling and walls of the big important rooms, and the statue gallery was beyond description – marble is VERY beautiful.

















After spending the second half of the day at Chatsworth, we headed back to Dotti’s where she made us a delicious dinner and we all got a (relatively) early night. :P

Sunday we went to Dotti’s meeting which was really special, and then after the typical ‘English Pub Lunch’, Anna, Ben and I headed back to Crawley – via Cambridge.

Cambridge was absolutely adorable... we explored around the streets and then hired a punt (Editor's (i.e. Anna's) note: punt = a flat-bottomed boat propelled using a long pole). Our punting guide was very cute and kept us entertained with stories of the various exploits of past Cambridge students.

Our favourite was the story of the witch’s hat on the right steeple of King's College Chapel (Editor's note: witch's hat = traffic cone). Apparently some student climbed to the top and left the witch’s hat up there to prove he’d done it (Editor's note: see tall building on left in photo of Delle below). The university then hired a crew to get it down – and was told it would take 4 days to put the scaffolding up to reach it. On the third night the climber climbed back to the top, removed the witch’s hat and put it on the opposite steeple. :P We assume that at some point they got it down, and now there are spikes around the edges of the steeples further down to prevent any more adventures of a similar sort.









After our relaxing cruise down the river, we headed back to the car and drove leisurely home – Anna and Ben ready to face another week of work and me… well, adrenalin can only get you so far… I had some serious sleep to catch up on. :P

Guest blog entry #1 from Delle – THE FIRST DAY

A HUGE hello to all back home and to those who haven't met me yet, 'Hi, I'm Delle (obviously!) - I'm an Aussie girl from Brisbane, Queensland, and I am very very very VERY excited to be in England visiting Anna and Ben!!!!'

My adventure begins after many many many hours of flying - these I have attempted to block from my memory so we'll move right on to arriving at Heathrow at about 6am local time on Friday the 4th of July. I travelled over with Lachlan, the younger brother of Dotti (another Aussie girl living over here at the moment who has previously featured in this blog). Anna and Ben were quite easy to identify at the airport due to Anna's wild and enthusiastic arm-waving. :) Very handy!

After stuffing our assorted luggage into the car, we drove to a nearby station and caught the tube into London. Our next stop was the Russian Embassy where we were to meet up with Dotti and hopefully obtain a visa for Lachlan. Anna, Ben and I left them in the rather lengthy queue (see picture below) and headed off to explore a little of London. Our first stop was Notting Hill and the Portobello Road Markets (see photo below).





The first place we stopped at was a cute little hat stall and tiny shop – which turned out to be the site of my first significant and spectacularly clumsy moment. Now at this point I must defend myself in advance:

1. Take note that I had only maybe a few hours of sleep within the last 30 hour period.
2. That brief slumber was taken virtually upright on a plane and therefore not exactly what you would classify as the highest quality.
3. I have very poor spatial awareness at the best of times and so it wasn't particularly surprising when the following occurred...

Wandering leisurely into the back of the tiny shop, I browsed through the selection of hats – along the back wall were row upon row of them. What I failed to notice was that although the hats were in neat horizontal lines, the floor was not!!! As I ran my eye along the hats I literally stepped into thin air and tumbled down one flight of stairs, around a corner, and down a second flight of stairs, eventually stopping a few steps from the bottom and nearly ending up in the poor shop-owner's storeroom.

Ben was directly behind me and quickly ran down the stairs to check I was okay. Anna had been outside the shop but her attention was caught by the sound of a multitude of hats falling off the wall inside the shop. Upon realising that it was me as well as the hats that had fallen, she suddenly had visions of VERY terrible things having happened to me – and I had only been in the country about 3 hours!!! I did have to be helped to my feet as I was absolutely hysterical with laughter...this was just so typical! For Anna it was probably a relief to discover that I could still walk, talk and breathe, and emerged from the experience relatively unscathed – albeit with some minor bruises on my arms, legs and ribs and a couple of bumps on my head (don't worry Mum! - just assume this is a significant exaggeration of the true events :P).

That experience past, we wandered happily for an hour or so around the rest of the markets. Afterwards we headed via Baker Street to Regent's Park, where we had a lovely lunch and rejoined Dotti and Lachlan – back from their unfortunately unsuccessful trip to the Russian Embassy. We then wandered alongside the Thames and saw a few more of the sights of London.

After that, we caught the tube back to where the car was parked and headed north to Mansfield - where Dotti is currently living.

I have never felt so tired in my life and I have never been so glad to finally shower and flop into bed – completely and utterly exhausted!!!!